Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwiches: Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Series and Everyday Life

Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone novels have not attracted the critical attention they deserve, given the longevity of the series, their enduring national and international popularity, and their impressively high quality. In part, this may be because they do not respond particularly well to some of the critical paradigms frequently applied to crime fiction. For example, while Grafton’s position as a trailblazer of the feminist hardboiled alongside writers like Marcia Muller and Sara Paretsky has been generally acknowledged (Gavin 264), her novels resist the sort of radical readings that can be applied to other work of this type: this is not obviously a “literature of dissent” as Beverly G. Six describes Paretsky's work (144). Here, I am proposing an alternate reading which examines the way Grafton’s novels focus on the everyday life of ordinary places, experiences, and routines. Any reader of the Millhone novels will have noticed their fascination with the banal realities of the quotidian – an interest that can at times be hard to reconcile with their investigative plots and the ostensible reliance of the hardboiled on violent action for its effects. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (L'invention du quotidien, 1980) and Liesl Olsen’s Modernism and the Ordinary (2009) for a theoretical framework, and using material from across the Alphabet series, this essay will thus bring attention to a neglected facet of Grafton’s work, and contribute to a timely re-evaluation of its significance.